It's About Not Eating

My first twelve step sponsor used to say that if you want to know why you're eating, stop eating.

Seven weeks ago, I commited myself to abstinence and a symptom which my therapist had remarked upon, but which I had pooh-poohed as just being tense, immediately presented itself: a knot of anxiety that lives in my stomach and freezes me to my chair. Clonzapem helps, but my stash has been running low as I wait for my prescription to arrive.

In a way, I'm glad my prescripton hasn't come yet. I've had to learn how ever-present the Knot actually is. It is in my dreams and at my waking, beating a cooking pot lid with a wooden spoon. It wants to drag me back into bed when I want to do laundry, and it chooses to do aerobics when I sit down to write. We've spent six weeks at constant odds with one another as it refuses to tell me what it wants or why it's there, and I've had to be useful despite it.

In the last week, however, I've begun to reason with the Knot rather than resist it, and the logic I use is the logic of not eating. "Twist me up and tie me down," I tell it, "but if don't cause harm to a dog or a human, and if I don't eat off my food plan, I cannot fail today." I may not be comfortable with the Knot, or able to interpret it in my emotional infancy of abstinence, but no one, today, is going to kick me off the planet, either. Slowly, a little more each day, I make a little progress as I wait for the Knot to reveal itself.

For over a year, sugar had quelled the Knot, putting me to sleep muffled in cotton wool, and isolating me from the business of mutuality. I didn't leave the house to mingle with the world, I left it like a vampire: at night, headed to a busy subway stop deli staffed by clerks who were too sleepy to want chat or note my visitations. I ate to the dregs in order to sleep, then sleep-walked through through the daylight hours I cursed because of the toxins and guilty conscience and survived until the sun went down again.

Not eating means that I have to take the Knot with me to a proper grocery store, with a list in hand. Not eating means I deny the Knot's inability to be useful by cooking the food and washing the dishes. Not eating means I have to be alert to weighing and measuring my food and to communicate my food to my sponsor. Not eating is a thing of daylight, sentience, continence, publicity, practicality, foresight and communion; it is anathema to how I eat sugar and, for that matter, to how the Knot weighs me down in hidden, inarticulate and immobile silence.

I know the Knot has information that I need. There is fear in the Knot, obviously, although of what I'm not sure. I only know that it can't win if I don't engage in unlicensed eating and that, meal by measured and discussed meal, we both have to engage in forms of activity that nudge us into the world of the living. Perhaps, in another seven weeks or seven years, I will have sorted out the fear and loathing and it will absorb the guarantees of not failing.